We're going to wrap up our live blog politics coverage for the day. Here's a summary of what happened:

•The Senate passed bills to extend tax cuts for households making under $250,000 but not for households making more than that. Tax law was not expected to change. Both sides declared victory.

•Mitt Romney is in London, England. He has multiple photo ops planned for tomorrow, but no press avails. He's going to speak with his teeth.

•The Romney camp denied an adviser made the argument that a Romney presidency would be better for the UK because of Romney's "Anglo-Saxon heritage" (in tacit contrast with the president's heritage, which is... in fact Anglo-Saxon). The Obama camp professed disgust.

•Timothy Geithner answered questions about the Libor rate-fixing scandal in testimony before Congress. Geithner rejected the notion that as chair of the NY Fed at the time (2008) he could or should have done more to warn the US government about possible rate fixing in the UK. He was not subject to much rebuttal of consequence.

See you tomorrow!

10.27pm BST

Senate Democrats have succeeded in passing a bill to extend Bush-era tax cuts for households making $250,000 and less, hours after Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dropped his threat to filibuster the vote should Democrats bring it to the floor.

The bill, which passed the Senate by a vote of 51-48, would not extend tax cuts for the highest-earning households.

“This is not a serious piece of legislation because it is not going anywhere,” said McConnell. A separate, Republican-backed bill to extend all tax cuts through 2013 was voted down.

An equivalent bill has not been considered in the House and did not appear to be on the way to the House floor. Despite the unlikelihood of a change in the law, the Senate vote gives political cover to Democrats in an election year.

Supporters can say they voted against extending tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans can say they voted in favor of tax cuts. Constituents? What constituents?

The Romney campaign has responded to the charge that an adviser had played the Anglo-Saxon card. The campaign denies that any of its advisers made such a remark. The campaign impugns the reporting of the Telegraph, "a foreign newspaper." Here's the statement, obtained by Evan McMorris-Santoro of TPM:

Today, the race for the highest office in our land was diminished to a sad level when the vice president of the United States used an anonymous and false quote from a foreign newspaper to prop up their flailing campaign,” Romney spokesperson Ryan Williams said in a statement. “The president’s own press secretary has repeatedly discredited anonymous sources, yet his political advisors saw fit to advance a falsehood. We have very serious problems confronting our nation and American families are hurting, yet the Obama campaign continues to try to divert voters’ attention with specious shiny objects. We have more faith in American voters, and know they will see this latest desperate ploy for what it is.

Updated at 7.38pm BST

7.09pm BST

Mitt Romney's adviser claims Romney is more Anglo-Saxon than Obama (what strange turn in our wayward course has brought us to this haunted crossroads?) but now Edward McClelland points out on NBC's local Chicago site that Obama's mom was of English descent and the president is "actually more Anglo-Saxon than many of his predecessors."

So, there.

McClelland has a list of presidents who were less Anglo-Saxon than Obama. Among them:

John F. Kennedy, 1961-1963: Kennedy’s Irish ancestors had been in conflict with the Anglo-Saxons for hundreds of years. His maternal ancestor, Thomas Fitzgerald, emigrated to America during the Irish Potato Famine, one of the low points of that relationship. As president, though, Kennedy visited Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace.

We had anticipated getting back to the new Sheldon Adelson-funded ad campaign against the president this morning, but how time will fly. Without further ado, here's the first ad in the series, which targets Jewish potential swing voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Jeff Zeleny writes in the New York Times:

"[Obama] is going to place Israel in a position where they're in danger."

From Zeleny's piece:

A Gallup poll of voters from June 1 to July 22 showed that Mr. Obama held a lead over Mr. Romney among Jewish voters of 67 percent to 25 percent. They said they strongly supported liberal issues that traditionally align with Democrats, including abortion rights,same-sex marriage and an overhaul of immigration laws.

But if Mr. Romney won 25 percent of the Jewish vote, it would be the best showing by a Republican candidate in more than two decades, which could be especially important in swing states, where the margin of victory could be narrow. Four years ago, Senator John McCain won about 21 percent of the Jewish vote.

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have”.

[...]

The two advisers said Mr Romney would seek to reinstate the Churchill bust displayed in the Oval Office by George W. Bush but returned to British diplomats by Mr Obama when he took office in 2009. One said Mr Romney viewed the move as “symbolically important” while the other said it was “just for starters”, adding: “He is naturally more Atlanticist”.

A couple possibilities here:

1) a Romney adviser is speaking out of turn to the media, and by speaking out of turn we mean peddling unveiled racism in a stunningly misguided attempt to make a winning political point; or

2) the Telegraph got played by a fake Romney adviser whose technique for shanking the Romney campaign was to pose as a racist nincompoop.

Our good faith extended to our Telegraph colleagues, we confront the first possibility: that said racist nincompoop is actually a real live political adviser in the employ of the Romney campaign.

"In remarks that may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity," writes Telegraph correspondent Jon Swaine, "one [adviser] suggested that Mr Romney was better placed to understand the depth of ties between the two countries than Mr Obama, whose father was from Africa."

Romney has many advisers, not all of whom he is in close contact with, and the candidate should no more be held accountable for all the slivers of hate that may live in any of those surrogates' hearts than Barack Obama should be held accountable for, say, what Hilary Rosen thinks of Ann Romney.

What do you think? Our feeling is that anything that looks like ESPN is a good idea. Maybe it's possible to fool people into not thinking they're watching another attack ad. The president himself sets up the conceit with his line, "look at the tape." Americans love looking at the tape. Some of us still remember when instant replays in the NFL were up for debate, when player challenges in tennis weren't de rigueur. We don't miss the old days. We want to look at the tape!

4.28pm BST

Back to the Geithner hearing, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., has offered Geithner the broadest support so far. My colleague Dominic Rushe is watching the hearing and sees some local motivations behind Maloney's acute concern over malfeasance in London:

Carolyn Maloney has recently been a big London basher in Washington. The New York Democrat has blamed lax regulation in the UK for a series of crises from JP Morgan to AIG at recent financial services committee hearings. I guess it would be churlish to point out that New York would be the main beneficiary if London was to lose business as a result of the Libor scandal.

4.17pm BST

I'll see your George Clooney and raise (?) you a Robert Duvall: The elder actor will host a fundraiser for the Romney campaign in September, the National Journal reports:

General reception tickets are $2,500 per person. The VIP photo reception goes for $10,000 a person. Tickets to dinner are $25,000. Ann Romney will be in attendance, according to the event flier.

An hour into his testimony, Geithner is through the first batch of Libor questions. The upshot of his testimony is this: We knew in 2008 the rate was subject to manipulation. But we believed it was the best indicator we had. We were bailing other boats as fast as we could and we were making decisions under pressure and at speed. I told the president's advisers about our Libor concerns. We covered our ass (excuse our French).

"I think that was the right choice back then," Geithner said.

It's an unapologetic position that admits no fault. Meanwhile none of the GOP reps is really laying a glove on him.

3.27pm BST

Trust Ron Paul to have a unique take on Libor. He basically says: "Manipulating interest rates for the benefit of narrow special interests – isn't that basically what the Federal Reserve does every day?"

"No I would not make any comparison," Geithner says. "I don't think they're remotely similar."

The contrast, Geithner says, is that it's the Fed's job "to keep prices low and stable over time and unemployment low over time." The fed works in the public interest, Geithner says.

Paul disagrees. And his time's up. Agree to disagree.

Updated at 3.30pm BST

3.24pm BST

From the Comments: "Yea, well he ran the New York fed so if he didn't know about it he is pretty incompetent. But of course he didn't "know" anything about it because no one is accountable in this industry."

It's a good point that hovers in the background of a hearing like this. Allowing that the former central banker sitting in the testifying chair may have failed in the face of blatant market manipulation, what should the consequences be? Is Timothy Geithner more culpable than Ben Bernanke, Bush's Fed chair? More than Henry Paulson, secretary of the Treasury at the time and one of the members of the president's working group on financial markets? Where are they?

Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas presses Geithner on why the NY Fed kept using the Libor rate when they knew it was subject to manipulation.

"I think that was the right choice back then," Geithner says.

3.07pm BST

Geithner is asked by committee chair Spencer Bachus (R-Ala) whether the Libor manipulation impacted US taxpayers, because the US Fed used the Libor rate for its own projections.

Geithner said in estimating lending rates "we used the best rate available at the time." He says the NY Fed was in the same position as "investors around the world" and had to take advantage of the rates available at the time.

That sounds like a yes.

3.03pm BST

First question for Geithner: When did you alert the US Treasury and the DoJ of the possibility that Libor was being rigged, and to whom did you state those concerns?

Geithner says in 2008, Euro banks had a tough time raising dollars and there was pressure to misreport. "We took a very careful look at those concerns... we [brought] those concerns" to the relevant agencies, Geithner says.

The DoJ wasn't on the list, Geithner says.

"We were absolutely aware that banks were underreporting or misreporting, but the nature of the rate... we were aware of the risk that the way this was designed created not only the incentive for banks to underrerport, but gave them the opportunity to underreport."

2.57pm BST

Arizona Rep. David Schweikert, who sits on the financial services committee, is on Twitter! He's junior so he has kind of a nosebleed seat. But you can just make out Geithner there in the middle.

Timothy Geithner is seated before the House Financial Services Committee. Sitting congresspeople of the committee are greeting him with mild speechifying about the depth of the nation's lasting financial crisis.

Geithner's prepared remarks do not mention the almost $300m that regulators in the US and the UK fined Barclays bank last month for manipulating the London interbank lending benchmark, known as Libor. It's a big deal because the job of setting the benchmark is supposed to belong to the central bank, not private banks. Fixing the rate amounts to market manipulation. It's a big deal in the United States, apart from the implications for global markets, because three US banks – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup – help set the Libor rate.

It's a big deal for Geithner because he ran the New York fed at the time of the rate fixing in 2008. The question is whether and how much he knew about the rate-fixing and what he did or didn't do about it.

Updated at 3.04pm BST

2.20pm BST

Good morning and welcome to our Wednesday live blog politics coverage. Here's a summary of where things stand:

•Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner appears before a House committee this morning to answer questions about his guidance of the New York Fed during the Barclays rate-fixing scandal. He'll talk about the European crisis generally. We'll be listening.

• Mitt has landed. The Republican presidential candidate begins his world turn with a stay in London that will culminate Friday with his attendance at the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics. No reports on whether he has yet been caught in traffic.

•Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, has funneled more of his prodigious millions into a campaign to win Jewish voters for Romney in swing states, Jeff Zeleny reports.We'll take a look at that ad campaign later this morning.

•A pro-Obama Super PAC is out with a new chuckle-inducing ad that uses footage of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics to accuse Romney of outsourcing jobs, keeping overseas bank accounts and off-shoring "millions to avoid US taxes." The kicker: "You've got to say this about Mitt Romney: He sure knows how to go for the gold... for himself." ZING